I will praise thee; for I am fearfully and wonderfully made:
Psalm 139:14
"Beautiful. Flawless.
The kinetochore (from the Greek “motion place”)
binds the spindle fibers to the centromere of each chromosome, a spot at
the center of a chromosome made for attachment to the spindle. 
Those
who recall the stages of cell division in high school remember that the
chromosome pairs all line up in the center of the cell.
--At metaphase,
something “lassos” each sister chromatid (individual member of the pair)
at the centromere and exerts force to pull them apart into the daughter
cells at anaphase.
--The kinetochore is right at the center of this action, binding to both
the centromere and the microtubules in the spindle.
It is therefore not
only a machine able to contact each chromosome’s centromere; it is also a
traffic cop. It will not let cell division proceed until it gives the
green light.
What the Max Planck team actually saw was not a random, purposeless
process on stage. They saw a beautiful, flawless machine that works
perfectly almost all the time. Kinetochores are pulling chromosomes
apart into daughter cells every day, in every eukaryotic organism, all
over the world.
Q: How many quadrillions of times has this occurred without
an evolutionary upgrade?
Musacchio’s team has been able to imitate the performance with homemade
proteins. When they assemble their “Lego pieces” in a dish, they snap
together like a kinetochore.
Next, the team wants to see what their
imitation machines do when given ATP for energy. Will they be able to
pull on microtubules? Will they know when to play ‘red light, green
light’?"
CEH
